The British may be troublesome and reluctant Europeans, writes former UK ambassador to the EU Stephen Wall, but they are also conscientious, having championed the Single Market, economic reform, free trade and enlargement

“If you had not been born English, what would you have wanted to be?” When that question was put to 19th century statesman Lord Palmerston, he replied: “If I had not been born English, I should have wanted to be English”.

Similar sentiments were reported four centuries earlier by the secretary to a Venetian delegation to London. In a twist to the English aphorism that there would be nothing wrong with France if it were not for the presence of the French, he found England admirable but the English unbearable. “They think”, he wrote, “that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England”.

MATTERS OF OPINION

EU membership brings little benefit, says UK public Fewer than half of the British people questioned in a Eurobarometer poll last year saw any major benefits from EU membership and this relative lack of enthusiasm showed a sharp increase since 2006. For example, the number of people who thought that British consumers benefit from the EU-wide free market in goods and services dropped substantially from 63% in 2006 to 49% last year. Those who feel that EU membership has improved working conditions also fell, from 51% to 42% over the same period. A majority of Britons thought that EU membership has not improved people’s working conditions, has not meant peace in Europe or improved their own civil rights. According to the survey, conducted on behalf of the European Commission, there was slightly more appreciation of the benefits of EU membership in the areas of the single market, the environment and trade negotiations. In these areas, a majority was supportive of the EU’s contribution, but they still represented fewer than half of those surveyed. Views varied considerably across the different UK regions. People in London, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland tended to be more positive about the benefits of EU membership, while those in the South-East, the East of England and the East Midlands were less so. http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/

Yet this was only a few years before Erasmus in Amsterdam and Thomas More in London were sharing and exchanging views which reflected a common language, (Latin) a common faith (pre-reformation Christianity) and a common sense of being men of a shared culture. They would not have thought of themselves as Europeans but they were leaders of thought in a world, Christendom, which had uniform and recognisable characteristics. That world was about to be split down the middle, theologically by Martin Luther and, in England politically by King Henry VIII. The English Reformation is not the start of British separateness but it is one of its defining moments.

Islands, of course, are different. All invaders and would-be invaders have had to think hard about wind and tide, from Julius Caesar to William of Normandy, Philip II of Spain, Napoleon and Hitler. “We are waiting for the long-promised invasion” said Churchill in a broadcast to the French people in 1940. “So are the fishes”. And the British psychology mirrors that inescapable fact of life. Nowhere in Britain is more than seventy miles from the sea. The Royal Navy remains the senior armed service. Such natural disasters as afflict us tend to come not from earthquakes and tornados but from the sea. Dependent always on trade by sea for our economic survival, we were dependent always for political survival also on the safety of the sea, which was our best barrier against continental encroachment. “If we have to choose between Europe and the open sea, we will always choose the open sea” Churchill told De Gaulle.

And it was not just the British who saw themselves that way. Weighing up his second veto on Britain’s attempt to join the European Economic Community in 1967, De Gaulle admitted that Britain did appear, as he put it, to want to “moor herself” alongside Europe. That did not mean, in his view, that we could be Europeans.

For their part, when Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided to apply to join the Common Market in 1962, and when his Labour successor Harold Wilson renewed the application in 1967, their decision was of the head but not the heart. Had there been a viable alternative, the British Government would have taken it. The advice both the Treasury and the Foreign Office in the mid-1950s was that the best option for Britain, economically and politically, was for there to be no EEC. But if there was to be an EEC, we might have to join.

That logic was not powerful enough to persuade the British government of the day to sign up to the European project, but it became compelling within four years of the signature of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Britain’s trade with its Commonwealth, which had been much more valuable than trade with continental Europe, was diminishing. The European Free Trade Area, comprising Britain and the non-EEC countries of northern Europe, did not have the commercial or political clout of the new Community. The temptation of a North Atlantic Free Trade Area with the United States and Canada appealed to some in Britain, but to very few in the United States. It was bad enough for America to have to provide the security umbrella for the whole of the free world. The last thing Americans wanted was an economic entanglement with a continent with which they had been painfully embroiled twice in half a century already.

So, Britain was forced to conclude that we had nowhere else to go if we were to have the economic power that would, in turn, give us political influence in a world dominated by the two superpowers: the US and Soviet Russia. We would become Europeans. We would sign up to the Treaty of Rome (the very title of which sent shivers down the spines of Protestant Englishmen). We would, because we had no choice, accept the existing policies of our new partners, including an agricultural policy designed explicitly for the benefit of French farmers and which would prove expensive to British taxpayers. We would accept the supra-national institutions of the EC and the sharing of sovereignty. We might, so Finance Minister and Prime Minister to-be James Callaghan told an audience of City of London bankers in 1966, accept a single currency. What we did not sign up for, in our hearts, was the political dynamic inherent in the vision of Monnet, Schumann and De Gasperi: the “ever closer union among the people of Europe”. We hoped that French scepticism about the supra-national bits of the European project would keep things in check and that policy would be led by national governments, rather than by international institutions.

This feeling about the EEC was instinctive to politicians and journalists and to public opinion in Britain. It was rooted in our history and symbolised by the fact that in the British constitution, sovereignty rests with Parliament. We had the realisation, not always articulated, that joining the EEC was a sea-change from the concept that no Parliament in Britain could bind its successor. Short of leaving the organisation altogether European laws would, unlike national ones, be irreversible. We could live with that. We could even live with the accretion of European competences: the incoming tide which, in the words of leading jurist Lord Denning “flows into the estuaries and up the rivers.” But when, in 1985, it was proposed to rewrite the Treaty of Rome to achieve the European Single Market which had been blocked by constant invocation of the rule of unanimity, it was not just Margaret Thatcher who said no. Sir Geoffrey Howe warned his fellow European foreign ministers that the Treaty of Rome was the constitution of the European Community and we would seek to change it at our peril.

In the end, Margaret Thatcher swallowed hard and accepted Treaty change because she saw it as the only way to achieve the single market and the liberal European economy of which she had been both the pioneer and the champion. But each successive European Treaty change has been hard for Britain for similar reasons. The gradual accretion of competence by the European Union we can live with. Stark reminders of the road we have travelled and an invitation, through treaty change, to embark on significant new ventures in sovereignty-sharing arouse atavistic feelings that politicians prefer not to have to contend with. Some of these sentiments are a reflection of our desire to put on our rose tinted spectacles and take a nostalgic journey back to a world we have lost. Some of them reflect hard-headed assessment of our national interest, reinforced by sentiment. There is one very good reason of policy for successive British governments to have resisted EU tax matters being set by majority vote: the EU would have harmonised upwards. But that justifiable self-interest has been reinforced by sentiment going back as far as the cold January day in 1649 when Parliament cut off the king’s head to assert its rights over taxation.

So, yes, we are reluctant Europeans, but Europeans for all that. And we take our obligations seriously. President Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, found negotiating with the Brits hell. We argued over every damn thing. But, once we had reached an agreement, we stuck to it. Negotiating with the French, by contrast, was easy – until you realised that it was only after the agreement was signed that the real differences were aired.

As a conscientious, if troublesome, member of the European Union, Britain has championed the creation of the single market, economic reform, free trade and enlargement. Not a bad record to set alongside our institutional foot-dragging, caused in part by the fact we also drag our historical chains around with us. We have no choice but to be European. As we fact the perils of climate change and of energy and other security challenges to whom do we turn for help? The logical place to start is with the 26 fellow European democracies that are our neighbours; neighbours who just happen to be linked with us in a framework of law and values called the European Union.